The White House announced Wednesday that it was quadrupling the number of signatures required to receive an official response to a petition on its “We the People” website.

“Starting today, as we move into a second term, petitions must receive 100,000 signatures in 30 days in order to receive an official response from the Obama Administration,” White House director of digital strategy Macon Phillips wrote in a blog post. “This new threshold applies only to petitions created from this point forward and is not retroactively applied to ones that already exist.”

Sorry if I’m cynical about this, but then the only legitimate purpose that I can see for these things is to poke the Obama administration with a pointy stick on, say, legalizing marijuana. Or closing Gitmo. Or drone strikes. Or anything else that the President does that broke a campaign promise, although admittedly a list of that is admittedly a bit more extensive than I first contemplated. Anyway, if you think that Barack Obama is actually going to take any of these petitions seriously, well. Please don’t operate heavy machinery.

“Deport Everyone [Who] Signed a Petition to Withdraw Their State from the United States of America,” reads this petition, which has no text other than the title but I think still gets its message across. A little nastier is “Strip the Citizenship from Everyone Who Signed a Petition to Secede and Exile Them,” although its single sentence asking the president to do this by executive order is itself fairly polite. (Would doing this by executive order be legal? Of course not, but neither is dropping bombs on citizens or locking them up indefinitely without a trial, even if a Nobel Peace Prize winner is doing it.)